Welcome to the eighth episode of our mobile Industry Exposed interview series! This time, we spoke to Ran Avrahamy, who heads up marketing at AppsFlyer, about the latest mobile trends, such as native advertising.

Ran Avrahamy is the Head of Marketing at AppsFlyer and former co-founder of Scringo. Managing a complicated relationship with mobile. (Too) early adopter. Loves being an entrepreneur – hates the word entrepreneur. Read our interview with Ran to find out what he has to say about the latest developments in mobile, mobile fraud detection, retargeting, native advertising and more.

What is AppsFlyer and what is your current offering and positioning in the market? AppsFlyer is a leading mobile advertising measurement platform that enables app marketers, brands and ad agencies to optimize their marketing spend by tracking and measuring their mobile app campaigns across more than 600 integrated mobile ad networks, including social campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. A single real-time dashboard gives app marketers all the tools they need to achieve the biggest return on their app marketing dollars, including campaign ROI, lifetime value, retention reports, attribution analytics, cohort analysis, retargeting, smart deep linking and more. The platform currently measures more than $1 billion in annual mobile ad spend and more than 250 million installs every month. Clients include the Wall Street Journal, RedBull, Mail.Ru, Kingsoft, YPlan and HipMunk.

What are the most important things for mobile advertisers to look for in their tracking provider? The number one quality to look out for is accuracy. In terms of AppFlyer’s offerings, the Native Track solution is accepted industry-wide as an accurate and unbiased tracking and attribution solution. The second most important thing to watch out for is whether a tracking provider has integrations with the right ad networks. AppsFlyer, for example, is an official partner of both Facebook and Twitter, as well as being integrated with over 600 ad networks.

What interesting trends and developments are you seeing right now in mobile advertising and mobile in general?There’s rapid growth in advertising on mobile networks, as is evident from Facebook’s massive growth in mobile advertising revenue this year. User lifetime value (LTV) and user quality continue to be a focus of app marketers. Additionally, in general, we have seen that mobile is beginning to mature, with more and more options for ad formats, such as native advertising formats, to choose from.

What advice would you give mobile advertisers in terms of best practices for running campaigns, and in general?Understand your target segments, choose the right networks and ad formats for your campaigns, and constantly test and optimize.

What are your views on mobile retargeting? How can it benefit mobile game developers?If web retargeting has shown us anything, it is that retargeting can be a truly powerful channel for marketers. Mobile game developers have a great opportunity in mobile retargeting to be creative with their ad messaging in order to re-activate, re-engage and upsell to their users.

Fraud on mobile is a hot topic advertisers are worried about. Which solutions are you offering in this area?When we find suspicious activity within a campaign, we immediately notify our user. On top of this, users are able to download their raw data, making it much easier for them to spot potentially fraudulent activities.

Native advertising is gaining speed on mobile, with a few companies appearing who are now offering native integrations, such as PubNative. What do you think we can expect in this space?I expect to see native advertising increase in popularity as more figures and forecasts come out and it becomes more possible. On mobile, the UX is extremely important, and native advertising provides the most seamless user experience when it comes to ads. So it’s a win-win situation; advertisers get their ads inserted natively into an app user’s user experience, and the app user doesn’t get distracted or annoyed by the ad.

How do you think mobile advertising will look in a few months, and a year from now? What are the main challenges ahead?Mobile advertising is changing so rapidly, it’s future is really exciting. I think we’re going to see a lot more creativity in the mobile ad space and a big focus on design, making ads blend into the user experience instead of disrupting it as ads traditionally have.

We would like to thank Ran for his time. The next Industry Exposed interview, which will be published in two weeks from now, stay tuned!

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